Much of my education as a “designer” [I was never formally trained as a designer, actually] was based on traveling and meeting people, spending time with them, working with them — for a bit. I did that at Cooper Union which lead to links to Herb Lubalin and Milton Glaser, Jack Lenor Larsen. Traveling to Darmstadt, Germany, I met and shared, explored the work, and my work, with Hermann Zapf. There were others, like connecting in an early inspirational spin with architect Richard Meier and later, designer Charles Gwathmey. My explorations took me all over the world, meeting people that I admired, sharing my work, getting critiques and moving on.

But the idea of learning works in two patterns, for one — other teachers, inspirations — and two, clients that are inspirations. My chance to work with remarkable clients doesn’t necessarily mean that they came to me, purely on the herald of reputation — but rather, I pursued them. Like this young bow-tie wearing dude, Steve Jobs.

I hunt for that — the learning,
the teachers,
the inspirational clients.

But, in working with Steve, the layering of the work was about building logo treatments for Macintosh — designing fonts, creating calligraphic treatments and running scripts, and, too — drawing icons of, and for, the Macintosh. And, usually, my first drafts were too “complicated” or — “too fancy” too luxury.

Later, working at NeXT Computer with Steve, he looked for more complicated if not “illustrative” treatments for conference logo design development. That came from a booklet I’d mailed him on our work in motion picture identity.

What struck me, as a memory, was the line [that Stuart intoned] “don’t make it cute.” Not that he ever said that to me — and I can’t characterize much of my work as “cute” per se, but there is inherently a drive to beauty = making beautiful things, bringing more of that presence to the world. It was this reference, on the Regis McKenna designer, the story of Janoff’s “designing of the original Apple logo” — noted the ApplePR | Advertising alliance to Regis McKenna, that brought it back to me. Later, the 80s, we worked with McKenna’s team on Apple, Wall Data and a string of other technology brands.

Working with Steve started with a call, then “can you come down here?” A meeting, fast and focused, usually one on one. I’d learn about the scope — never as a written brief — always live. From there, I’d develop solutions and either ship them, or fly to meet live.